The Onomatopoeia in Dad’s Comic Strip: A View to Persian and French Equivalents

Illustrated books (comic strip) are books in domain of youth literature in which author narrates the story in a different style: text, image and onomatopoeia together create vivid and fascinating scenes for young readers. With regard to the importance of this style, this paper tries to study the role of onomatopoeia in it. Inasmuch as these kinds of books have special position in children and adolescent literature of France and Belgium, as corpus of the research, we have chosen three volumes of Dad comic strip series and translated from French to Persian to do our comparative study on onomatopoeia. Furthermore, in this article we have considered the linguists’ definitions of onomatopoeia, their classification and place in this literary field. It is worth noting that in these three volumes we have analyzed onomatopoeia which we had faced with challenges to translate them into Persian. The analysis of examples has been done using Umberto Eco’s approach. This study leads us to identify phonetic and linguistic convergence and divergence of onomatopoeia in both French and Persian languages. Because, by referring to the dictionary of the Persian onomatopoeias (1389/2010) as a reliable source, in most cases, we have managed to find the equivalent by considering the Echo’s points of view. When there was no appropriate onomatopoeia for the word in Persian, we borrowed and transcribed; so as a result, not only have we removed the obstacles in translating onomatopoeias, but we have also noticed the richness of the Persian language in this field.